Understanding Your Most Successful Touchpoints: The Multi-Source Attribution Model

Marketing experts have come up with many concepts for how to attribute results and conversions to marketing tactics. To get the best idea of ​​what works best for you and drives new business, you should use a multi-source attribution model that weighs the value of each touchpoint.

While it’s harder to measure than the first and last touch models, it’s much better because it allows you to understand the impact all of your marketing channels and outreach efforts are having on conversion.

Here’s why.

What is a cross-source attribution model in marketing?

Within the concept of multi-source attribution, there are many attribution models, each with one important characteristic: a conversion is attributed to all interactions with a customer from the moment they meet you until the conversion.

These models include:

1. Linear attribution

With this model, you give equal weight to all touchpoints that lead to conversion. For example, if a customer finds you through search, then follows your social media posts, engages with your email, and finally completes an order thanks to a personalized sales message, each interaction gets equal weight.

Pros

• Allows you to take into account all marketing points with which the client interacted.
• Easy to set up and track, no matter how sophisticated your marketing tools are.

Cons

• Some interactions that have minimal impact on the customer may be overvalued.
• It is difficult to identify the most valuable marketing channels using this model.

2. Attribution with time decay

Like linear attribution, credit for a conversion is given to all marketing interactions. However, the weight of that credit increases as the customer gets closer to converting. For example, the first interaction might only receive 20%, the second 24%, the third 26%, and the last 30%.

How you weight the different interactions is up to you, but the last interaction will always carry the most weight.

Pros

• Ideal for relationship-based businesses, assuming that relationships grow stronger with every touchpoint.
• Helps identify the most influential touchpoints leading to customer conversion.

Cons

• Can’t tell the whole story, especially if the business has a short sales cycle.
• Perhaps there is a misplaced emphasis on early interactions that are critical to attracting new customers.

3. U-shaped attribution

Using this attribution anhui mobile number database model , you will give the most weight to the first and last touchpoints with the customer, and the least weight to everything in between. For example, if a customer finds you through a Google search ad, then engages with your ws database Instagram account, signs up for an email newsletter, and finally converts through an email campaign, you will give the most weight to the Google search ad and the email campaign.

Pros

• Ideal for companies  croatia mobile number database with longer sales cycles that require multiple touchpoints to drive conversion.
• All touchpoints are still taken into account, but those that attracted the client and led to the sale are highlighted.

Cons

• May underestimate the value of some touchpoints.
• For companies with a complex sales cycle that requires multiple touchpoints, conversion credit may be spread too thinly to be measured effectively.